Francesco Guicciardini
Guicciardini governed papal provinces for twenty years and then wrote the history that says the whole thing was ruined from 1494. He was a Florentine lawyer of good family, ambassador to Spain at twenty-eight, and then in papal service as governor of Modena, Reggio and Romagna - which meant administering, taxing and policing real territory rather than theorising about it. He was lieutenant-general of the papal armies in the war that ended with imperial troops sacking Rome in 1527, a defeat he had argued against the policy leading to. His friendship with Machiavelli produced a correspondence in which the two men disagree productively: Machiavelli generalises and Guicciardini keeps answering that particulars differ, that no rule survives contact with cases, and that a man should attend to his own discrezione. He served the Medici popes Leo X and Clement VII, and his career is a long argument with his own advice: he wrote that a prudent man attends to particulars and distrusts general rules, while spending his working life executing the general policy of a papacy that would not attend to particulars. The Ricordi, his private maxims, are the sharpest statement of that temperament, including the observation that he would like to see his own interests served and the world reformed, and does not expect both. The Storia d'Italia, written in retirement and published after his death, covers 1494 to 1534 and dates the ruin of Italy from the moment a Milanese duke invited the French king in against Naples. He wrote it in forced retirement. The Medici were restored to Florence in 1530 with his help, and the duke he had helped install then excluded him from government, which left him at his villa with the papers of thirty years and nothing else to do. It is the first history to treat Italy as a single field of action shaped by outside powers, and it is built on documents he had handled himself.
- Lived: 1483 CE – 1540 CE
- Nationality: Italian
- Roles: writer, politician
